Fadeaway Girl

by Martha Grimes

  “Anyway, as a treat for them, she brought ten orphans to the Hotel Paradise for lunch.”

  “How thoughtful.”

  I frowned. It had been my idea, actually. But not out of thoughtfulness. It was more like a bribe, the lunch, and I also threw in a performance of Medea, the Musical. “Those orphans weren’t much like these, though.” I had my chin cupped in my hands on the table, getting a different view of the cards for no reason. “They had terrible table manners.”

  “That’s too bad. I expect your mother went to a lot of trouble for them.”

  My mother went to trouble? I was the one who nearly had to horse-whip Will and Mill into doing the performance. I said, poking the card, “Of course these Orphans aren’t real; they just stand for something.”

  “What might they?”

  I shrugged and shook my head. I was sitting back now and looking at the ceiling. I wondered if I was avoiding something. I thought of the Devereau house across the lake that in the fog seemed to float like a tall gray ship. I thought of the misty pond near the Belle Ruin, where the deer came almost like phantom deer to drink. I thought of the Girl. Then I said, “Sometimes I wonder, How can you tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not?”

  I didn’t expect Mrs. Louderback to come up with the answer—you know, the one that solves all problems, past, present, and future. But I certainly didn’t expect her to say,

  “Maybe you can’t.”

  8

  I forgot my two-dollar contribution on the way out, which was probably why Mrs. Louderback’s housekeeper or whoever she was gave me an extra-stern look, although on her face it was hard to tell the difference from her other looks.

  Maybe my hand that was now feeling the dollar bills hadn’t wanted to let go because Mrs. Louderback hadn’t told me anything that made me feel better, and was there any other reason to pay a person?

  I kicked an empty Nehi can for a while down the road and then over to the curb when I saw a car coming. It was a buttercup yellow Chevy convertible, much bigger and fancier than Ree-Jane’s white one, and it was driven by Scarlett Bittinger. I liked her because she was so much competition for Ree-Jane, who, of course, hated her.

  Scarlett honked the horn and waved to me as she sped by. It was nice having someone her age treat me as if I was visible. Around her neck was a vivid green chiffon scarf that was raked by the wind, and as it sank from sight, I imagined Scarlett, in a night of wind and rain, on a dark road, and the scarfjust whipping over her face, blinding her, and the car going over an incline, busting through the white safety guard, and away.

  I hoped that wouldn’t happen to her. But it did give me an idea for Ree-Jane’s Christmas present: a chiffon scarf. I would describe how pretty Scarlett had looked in her scarf, driving her yellow convertible.

  After crossing the highway, I walked up the hotel drive, the one in the rear, wondering what was going on in the Big Garage, and if they still had Paul in there. Paul’s mother, who was our second dishwasher, was kind of slow. She forgot Paul a lot of the time. I could understand why.

  I cut around the cocktail garden, which looked as if the Baum party had been there. Half-empty glasses were scattered about and napkins balled up and tossed anywhere. There was a wreck of an hors d’oeuvre plate sitting on the table.

  I could see light through chinks in the Big Garage and walked over that way. Mill’s piano was going full speed ahead, and I heard loud laughter and talk and a high-pitched squeal that probably came from Paul. At my knock, all of this noise stopped so suddenly you’d have thought the night had swallowed it. It made me feel like not waiting around for Will to come to the door and do his who-are-you? act.

  I walked back toward the hotel and along the stone path to the rear door that led up to my room on the third floor. I met up with the hotel cat going from somewhere to somewhere and held the screen door for him in case he’d like to come with me. But he was far too busy. He did pause, though, to look up at me before he went on. I wished I had some business to take care of that made me that determined to do it.

  I heard voices drifting back from the front porch and the hyena-like laugh of Helene Baum, so I figured that the dinner was over and now they had gathered for more drinks on the porch. Mrs. Davidow always counted her own self into any dinner party if she knew the people at all. So if places were set for ten, it could end up eleven, with Lola squeezed in between the others.

  There was music too. Maybe Ree-Jane’s phonograph had been carted downstairs. I sat on the bottom step, my skirt pulled over my knees like a tent and my chin resting on my knees. “Tangerine” was playing.

  I remembered how I had sung this at the club along the Tamiami Trail and at the Roney Plaza. Rather, how I had pretended to sing it, since I hadn’t been invited along on the trip to Miami Beach. And it all seemed so long ago. I couldn’t understand why, as they’d come back from Florida hardly more than a week ago.

  I trudged up the steps like a person going to her doom. I told myself to stop being so dramatic, but it still had a kind of doomish feel to it.

  In my room was a toy chest that I didn’t open often, as I thought I was getting too old to play with stuffed animals and certainly dolls.

  There had been a big argument going on over my toy chest—still was, I supposed, for Ree-Jane hadn’t got it yet. Lola Davidow wanted me to give it to Ree-Jane to keep her things in it.

  “What things? I’m keeping my things in it.” It seemed to me that was a reasonable question although I admit I said it in a lofty way.

  Mrs. Davidow’s mouth worked in that way she had when she wanted to deliver a squelching comeback: lips bunching, relaxing, bunching again; mouth opening and shutting, saying nothing. It was like the characters in the cartoons we saw at the movies before the feature came on.

  I said to her that this chest had been mine since I was a baby. Her mouth finally worked and she told me I was just being selfish.

  Then Ree-Jane limped in (I like to picture her with a gimpy leg or even a clubfoot) and called me selfish too.

  “What do you want it for?” I said. “Do you have a dead body you want to stuff in it?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m using this chest.”

  “It’s just junk you’ve got in there.”

  “How do you know? Have you been in here looking around?”

  “All you’ve got in that chest is kid stuff.”

  “I know. I’m a kid.” That was the second time lately I’d allowed myself to be categorized that way. I hoped it wouldn’t become a habit. “Anyway, I haven’t got anyplace else for my mice to live.” I scratched my head as if I were really thinking.

  “Your what?”

  “Mice. There’s a mother and father and she has babies. You want to see?” I lifted the lid.

  Ree-Jane dragged her foot off, muttering.

  What was all this? If she really needed a chest like mine with its chipped and faded pink paint, well, her mother had plenty of money to buy one. She’d bought into the Hotel Paradise a few years ago and owned half of it. Maybe that was why she thought I should let go of my toy chest—because she owned half of it.

  And why would Ree-Jane want to be associated with a toy chest, especially mine?

  I knew my mother would probably be along soon, for both of them would complain to her about my selfishness. All my mother wanted to do was keep the peace.

  I opened the chest and looked inside, feeling now that all this stuff was of a value no one could guess. It might as well have been full of diamonds and rubies. There was a ragged doll—not a Raggedy Ann, but just plain ragged. Her hair was patched and one ear was missing. I felt sorry for her, mostly because I couldn’t remember when I’d last played with her. I couldn’t imagine playing with her now, although I wasn’t above getting a gauze square for her ear, as ears bleed a lot.

  As I took out one item after another, it struck me how much this chest was like Mary-Evelyn Devereau’s toy chest in that old house across
the lake.

  Mary-Evelyn. She was my age when she drowned, was drowned, her head shoved underwater until she couldn’t hold her breath any longer. I breathed deeply and wondered, How long could I hold my breath?

  Mary-Evelyn. If Rose Devereau had not run off with Ben Queen, Mary-Evelyn might not have died as she did. But it’s not fair putting it off on them, as they meant to come back for her. But then it was too late.

  Mary-Evelyn had owned a Mr. Ree game, the same as I did. For each player there was a character, a small hollow tube with a tiny doll-like head, removable for hiding the tiny weapons a player might pick up if the cards told him to do so. The thing is, two of these tubes had turned up, Artist George at Crystal Spring and the other, Niece Rhoda, at Brokedown House, and I thought the Girl had left them as some kind of clue—to what, I didn’t know. Perhaps simply that she’d been there.

  For all I know, I had left them myself.

  That wasn’t something I wanted to dwell on.

  9

  But dwell I did. It’s hard on a person to think she’s going crazy, especially when she’s only twelve. I haven’t come across many crazy people.

  Over in Weeks’s Nursing Home, where I sometimes went with my mother to take cakes and pies, I remembered a lot of old people sitting around with their mouths open. That looked kind of crazy, but that might instead just be what happens when you’re old.

  Sitting now by my toy chest, which might not be mine much longer, I inspected one of the tubes from the old Mr. Ree game: the Aunt Cora tube. I removed her head and stuck my finger inside. It would be a perfect place to leave a little rolled paper. But the two tubes I’d found, one at the spring and the other at Brokedown House, had been empty. I was almost glad for that now, for if I’d been writing messages to myself, I might soon be on the doorstep of Weeks’s with a suitcase instead of a pie. Since there were never any kids there, I figured there were probably places like that for kids too.

  And then I thought of Mary-Evelyn’s Mr. Ree box. Had two tubes been missing from hers? I thought back, hard. I remembered taking the game out of her toy chest and looking at all the pieces, but I might not have noticed a missing character tube.

  What if the same two pieces were missing there?

  Maybe I should go back. That idea didn’t appeal to me, not after what happened, not after I had almost got murdered.

  But the house itself, I had to think, was harmless. Places didn’t absorb the evil waves that vibrated off some people. The fourth floor of our hotel, the four small rooms up there, the floors and furniture and doors and walls: they hadn’t gone crazy just because Aurora Paradise lived in them.

  The Devereau house was just a house. It just happened to have been lived in by at least one totally crazy person and a couple of others that the house would have been better off without.

  Take Ree-Jane’s room, for instance. The bed and dresser didn’t think they were better than other beds and dressers just because Ree-Jane lived there.

  Ree-Jane.

  Ree-Jane had been in my room; otherwise, she wouldn’t have known what was in the toy chest. She could easily have taken Niece Rhoda and Artist George away. My mind moved swiftly to that ghastly-turned-wonderful ten minutes in the Rainbow Café when I’d come upon Ree-Jane sitting in my booth (mine and Maud’s and the Sheriff’s) with the Sheriff, when he showed me what she’d given him: an Artist George tube that she claimed she’d found at Crystal Spring, saying maybe that’s how I contacted Ben Queen. The Sheriff had told her off in five seconds flat (the wonderful part) and later given me the Artist George tube.

  Now this was not proof she’d taken Artist George from my game, because I had also found him in that stone alcove in Crystal Spring before she’d been there. But that piece might have been the one from Mary-Evelyn’s Mr. Ree, and Ree-Jane could still have taken mine.

  The Niece Rhoda tube Dwayne found in the woods around Brokedown House, which was near Lake Noir. I don’t think Ree-Jane had ever been there; it just wasn’t her kind of place; it was deserted, owlish, thickly wooded, and without anyone there to admire her beautiful self. Also, Fern Queen had been murdered very near there, at Mirror Pond, and I couldn’t imagine Ree-Jane going to a murder site unless under full police escort.

  10

  The next morning after my breakfast of lingonberry pancakes with powdered sugar sifted across them and syrup-swarmed (Faulkner, again), I was down at Slaw’s Garage.

  If there was one person to talk to about insanity it was Dwayne, who worked at Abel Slaw’s. Dwayne was the William Faulkner expert, which I thought unusual for a mechanic, but the mere fact of reading him would make a person an expert around here, since nobody else did.

  Slaw’s Garage was down the highway maybe a mile or so, and across the highway from the railroad station. An old boardwalk could be taken from near the hotel past some tennis courts. It ran parallel to the highway. People had long used the boardwalk for strolling to the post office or the general store, or to Jessie’s Restaurant, which was something like the Windy Run Diner.

  Abel Slaw employed Dwayne, master mechanic, and a couple other ordinary mechanics, but they were never all there at once. One was You-Boy, whose strange name he’d had from when he was little, and his mother always calling to him: “You, boy! Get in here!” Things like that.

  I looked to see if Mr. Slaw was in his office, and he wasn’t, which was a relief. He didn’t like me going into the garage.

  You-Boy was under one of the car lifts and saw me and tilted his wrench toward me by way of greeting. I heard a clanging coming from under another car, not up on a lift, and figured it was Dwayne. The car was one of those fancy foreign models, and I recognized it as belonging to Bubby Dubois, the Chevrolet dealer in La Porte. I’d rather be called You-Boy than Bubby. Imagine, a grown man still letting himself be called Bubby.

  Harsh metallic sounds came from beneath Bubby’s car. I don’t know why Dwayne didn’t just raise the car on the other lift, but then he was the master mechanic, so I guess he had his reasons.

  I hoisted myself up on the stack of new tires to wait for Dwayne to roll himself out. I sat there thinking how I liked the clanging sound of metal against metal and the smell of the new rubber. Then I stopped watching myself, posing as if the photographers were all gathered at Slaw’s today, taking my picture, and slid down onto the floor, then down on my knees. I had to squat even more until I could see under Bubby’s car where Dwayne lay on his rolling board. He was tightening up something under the car. A caged light hung from the car’s undersurface.

  “Dwayne?”

  He turned his head. He shook it slowly and in a wondering way, lying there on the pallet. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

  My cheek was now down on the cement. Dwayne had picked up his wrench and started tightening something. The underside of a car held no fascination for me, but as he wasn’t rolling himself out, I just lay down on the oil-stained floor and propped my head on my hand.

  “Dwayne,” I said. “Do you think a little kid”—that was the fourth time for the kid category, and this time with “little” in front of it—“could go crazy, even insane?”

  The noises stopped. He turned his head to look at me again. Even in the half dark of the car, he was handsome. Ree-Jane had a terrific crush on him; he did not have a crush on her, I am happy to say. I thought I would mention to her that there were a lot of handsome men in my life and how many could she say were in hers?

  He surprised me then by pushing himself out from under the car. He said, “Are you talking about that little kid that’s the dishwasher’s son?” Dwayne was getting up now and wiping his hands on the oily rag that he kept in his back pocket. All mechanics had one.

  “Him? Paul? No.” Paul was already insane, not going.

  “Okay, so who?”

  “Well, me, maybe.”

  “You? Christ almighty, you’re too ornery to go insane. Come on.” He nodded for me to follow him.

/>   “Ornery? What’s that got to do with it?” I walked after him.

  “With you, everything.” On the way out he said to You-Boy, “Tell Abel I’m over at Jessie’s when he gets back.”

  “Sure, Dwayne.” You-Boy smiled and gave him a wrench salute, hitting himself in the forehead coming back.

  Poor You-Boy. It was like something I’d do. “Wait up!” I called to Dwayne, who was now almost at the highway’s edge.

  We crossed the highway, then crossed the railroad tracks. I loved the old station. It was nearly as wonderful as the one in Cold Flat Junction.

  We got to Jessie’s Restaurant and Dwayne actually stepped back and held the screen door for me and I thanked him. I was still amazed that he’d be leaving work and going over here with me.

  The restaurant was bigger than the Windy Run Diner, but it always struck me as having diner intentions. There was a horseshoe counter, and the people now sitting there could have been the same ones who sat there every day. It was clear some at least knew some others. The ones sitting at the counter nodded to Dwayne, and he nodded back and then said hello to Jessie.

  I sat wondering if she had a crush on Dwayne too, the way she kind of came up to the other side of the counter as if in a moment she might be over it. Jessie was a pretty brunette, only she looked kind of worn.

  “Hello, lover,” she said.

  I might retch. And Dwayne took it without even a tenth of the smackdown he’d have given me if I’d tried saying something so silly. Of course I was twelve and Jessie was probably a hundred and twelve. Ha-ha.

  She got him his coffee and me my Cherry Coke, and after we’d taken our first sips, he said, “So what’s all this insanity stuff?”

  “Remember at Brokedown House you found that little game piece on the path that you didn’t know what it was?”

  “Yeah. Hollow tube thing.”

  I pulled the Mr. Perrin tube from my pocket and put it in front of him.

  Dwayne held it up, inspecting it. He had really nice hands with long fingers, a pianist’s hands, or, I guess, a master mechanic’s. “The one I found had a woman’s head.”